


commensalis

by doomcountry



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Grief/Mourning, Metaphysical Sex, Other, Season/Series 05, Xeno, disturbing imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24840562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcountry/pseuds/doomcountry
Summary: The tower is endlessly, impossibly tall, but Jon’s work is taller.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Jonathan Sims, Elias Bouchard/the Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 10
Kudos: 72





	commensalis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [klaxic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/klaxic/gifts).



The Archive is building.

He has been building almost from the moment he arrived. He never stops—he works with a frantic energy, hour after hour, day after day, though time has no meaning anymore, under the endless, crucifying gaze of the Eye that hovers overhead.

There is a distinct separation between Elias’ tower and what he is building. The tower is endlessly, impossibly tall, but Jon’s work is taller. Elias doesn’t know what it is made of—then again, he doubts he is supposed to know. When he stands inside that first vaulting room, at the place where his tower ends and Jon’s tower begins, he can run his hands along the walls: they feel papery, slightly damp, like papier mache not quite set. Sometimes he can see words rippling through them, hallucinatory; they vanish as soon as he tries to read them. All the time, the walls whisper.

Jon’s tower is organic. It has life in it. It lances upward toward the pupil of the Eye like a termite colony: rooms like caves, rudimentary staircases molded from nothing, upward-winding corridors, every surface peppered with windows, arching frames or tiny pinprick holes. Every surface peppered with rolling, bulging, curious eyes. Every surface whispering, whimpering, storytelling at a volume just below what Elias can comfortably hear.

He never stops building—Elias can lean out one of the huge vaulting windows, its edges formed like stalactites dripping downward, and watch him, high overhead, fluttering in constant motion. Whatever the tower is made of appears like clay in his furred black hands. His wings, their massive eyespots staring, whir with hummingbird speed.

He never stops building unless Elias tells him to.

When he begins the long climb up to the top of Jon’s tower, he pauses first, always, to visit Martin. If Elias is sorry for anything in this new world, he is sorry for Martin—and sorry then only selfishly. Poor thing. He was simply standing too close at the last moment, at the veil-rending instant at which the Archive burst out of Jon’s skin. Gripping his hands as if that would be enough to keep him inside. You can’t be Known that suddenly, that viciously, that completely, without consequences.

Martin is the reason Jon is building—if he stops, Elias knows, without something to ground him, he will give in immediately to despair, to the guilt of what he’s done to him. It was Martin’s wall that he built first.

Poor Martin. Suspended in the papery, crumbling enclosure a few stories up, his hands and head all that are visible now. Not dead, but not truly alive anymore, either—just a husk, a shell, all his insides eaten out by the Watcher. By Jon. His skin is sallow and sunken. His head lolls at an angle. Tears run perpetually down his face. His eyes are blank.

Elias wonders what he is feeling, and immediately the whispering wall answers. _Like a knife is scraping the inside of his stomach,_ it says, eyes skittering, looking in every direction. _Like a vegetable peeler is running up and down his nerves._

“Poor thing,” he says aloud, and the wall chatters in agreement.

He tries his best to mitigate the pain, when he comes up this way. He gently grips Martin’s chin and lifts his lolling head, his heavy skull, and wipes the tears away. He kisses him, chastely, on the mouth, and feeds into him something soft, to occupy his anguished mind for just a little while.

“That first night in Scotland, when you sat on the bare floor by the fire, and he came with a blanket around his shoulders and knelt down behind you,” he murmurs, watching the fluttering of Martin’s eyelashes. “And he put his arms around you. How safe you felt. How warm and loved.” He closes Martin’s eyes with two fingers, holds them there for a moment. “Feel it.”

The husk of Martin sighs, relaxing into his hands.

He doesn’t linger. He has a long way yet to climb.

Jon’s tower is beautiful, in the way that a spread of fungus on a forest floor is beautiful, or the intricate insides of a beehive are beautiful. To move through it is an experience bordering on the divine, for Elias, at least. It feels like a pilgrimage to mount the tiny steep spiral stairways or weave through a room crowded floor to ceiling with weird, undulating, twisting columns. To know that at the other end is his god—however hurt or desperate his god may be. He keeps a hand to the walls for most of the journey, feeling their crevices and textures, feeling here a surge of Choke and here a dip of I-Do-Not-Know-You, his fingers passing over eyes that turn inexorably to follow him as he goes.

It should be impossible to reach the top of anywhere, but there is an end to the tower. It narrows as it climbs, forcing Elias in ever-smaller configurations, pushing him up to his tiptoes to navigate a hallway hardly bigger across than he. The Archive has no use for the rooms or the corridors or the stairs. He’s building a place to store the knowledge that floods his brain on a constant basis, forcing the fears of the ruined world below him into the walls where they can speak themselves eternally, as fast as he can, before the Eye sees still more and bombards him with it. It is a pace that no creature could keep up forever. Elias has a duty to his god. A sense of responsibility—a love, he might have said, if he were still capable of such a thing.

He emerges onto a landing of a kind, the first surface open to the air. Overhead the Eye bulges downward toward him, simultaneously close enough to touch and impossibly distant. Jon, his massive wings buffeting the air, keeping him aloft, is working, two sets of arms forming their strange clay from the ether and daubing it like a potter wasp into an ever-growing balcony in which little beady eyes are already forming.

He doesn’t announce himself, doesn’t need to. As soon as Jon senses his presence he stills, his long black fingers still clutching the edge of his wall, his antennae probing the air in Elias’ direction. There is a tug behind Elias’ ribs and he follows it—the feeling of the Archive pulling on him, observing, knowing what little there might be left of him to know.

He doesn’t approach the wall too closely. He stops at a respectful distance and holds out a hand.

Jon stares at it, at him. He has no mouth anymore—moths usually don’t. Just his all-too-human eyes in the center of his face, and a thousand others peeking out from the velvety dark fur of his body. His wings are four times his width, gigantic, and their eyespots fixate on him, vibrating gently in midair.

“It’s time to rest,” Elias says softly, coaxing.

Jon hesitates, his fingers clawing at the clay.

“Come,” Elias says, with tenderness. He proffers his hand again.

There is always a thrill when the Archive touches him. A cosmic shiver that runs through his body and deep through the soul inside it. With that alone, he thinks, he could be content.

He guides Jon up and over the wall. The world around them dims, just a little. Jon’s doing, Elias knows. Though there is no one to see them but the Eye overhead, he knows Jon feels more comfortable when it’s darker. When he allows himself to be guided, the guiding light must be Elias. It is a role he deeply understands.

“Come,” he says again, softly. He reaches out and rests his hand against the back of Jon’s neck, where his fur is softest, plush beneath his fingers. Jon shivers and, almost without thought, flutters closer, his wings making great waves of frigid wind around them. He’s warm with nervous energy. His insectile body comes flush against Elias’ and he relaxes almost immediately, as if all the anxious drive in him has fallen away, and Elias wraps his loving arms around him, careful of his dusty wings, holding him close like a frightened child.

He doesn’t know anymore what Jon feels about him. Hate or indifference or love. He supposes Jon’s mind is too busy for anything but the work. But he always melts into Elias’ arms when Elias comes up to the top of the tower for him. He knows it means respite, whether or not he likes it. And he needs respite. He works so hard, always. He builds so constantly. Even gods need to rest.

Elias’ role is very simple. He exists to offer the Archive peace, in his own way.

Half of this level of the tower is already built. It looms overhead, a half-finished cathedral wall, complete with strange niches where, in another world, statues of saints might have stood. Flying buttresses that fly off into nothingness. He draws Jon gently in that direction, toward a rippling hollow pockmarked with caverns like half-burst bubbles, where in the new dimness shadows fall cool and inviting. Jon’s wings flutter weakly. He clings to Elias, his sharp fingers digging painfully into his flesh.

“Come,” Elias says, a third time. In the feathery, papery refuse of the half-built wall, the carpenter’s castoff, he coaxes Jon down, into a position of rest, on his back. His wings unfolded, near-enveloping the two of them. Jon’s hands explore his face, his throat, his chest, as if relearning something, and Elias lets them. No harm in it. And he loves being looked at, especially with such gratitude in Jon’s hundreds of thousands of eyes. He has all the time in the universe to build his tower. He knows he needs to rest.

The walls around them whisper frantically. Elias kneels down, straddling him, and leans to kiss him where his mouth would be if he had one, and Jon lets him. One pair of his hands grips Elias’ waist, not too hard, but with a timorous firmness, a _don’t leave me._ He has no intention of it. He leans down further, until he can press his face against the side of Jon’s, breathe in the soft dusty smell of him, feel the warmth of his velveteen fur.

He loves him—he always did, but even more so now, fully realized. He had never imagined how beautiful and strange he would be, and now he can only feel privileged beyond measure, that he is the Archive’s sole servant and keeper. Another pair of Jon’s arms wrap around his back, clutching him tight.

“Lie still,” Elias murmurs, and Jon obeys. It is the only time he is ever still, the only time that the irresistable urge to build goes dormant in him. So good and so obedient, Elias thinks, and kisses him again. His wings stop their humming and float in place, trembling softly, casting shade over them.

There is a gulf between the physical and the metaphysical that permeates every aspect of the universe now, and so Elias is not exactly certain how or with what part of him he leans forward to push _into_ Jon—piercing the soft flesh of his body somewhere below his hips, between his legs. He is barely certain of his own body, except for his hands—cradling Jon’s face, stroking the fur below the human eyes that stare up at him with tears floating in them. Jon’s arms grip him tighter, pull him closer, further _in_ , and Elias watches those eyes roll backward into his head, feels his own body going strange, his joints shifting, his bones moving without his permission or will. His spine curves at sixteen different angles, his belly going taut, and he feels some deeper part of him traveling down and through and into. Moments of peace and clarity. Moments of kindness. Moments of love. Things he Knows, curled up, small and shining, enough to flow into the Archive’s body and make space between the endless, constant litanies of fear that live inside him. Moments of joy. Jon’s joy, Elias’ joy, Jonah’s joy, Martin’s joy. Anything and everything he has to share. Jon shivers underneath him, all his eyes rolling wildly, but with every moment his grip on Elias loosening, his body relaxing, his wings gently drifting down to lie flat among the rubble. It lasts an hour, or a minute, or forever.

He lies there for a while with him after, unaware of the shape of himself, or if he even has one. Jon doesn’t move away. He curls up a little, but all his panicked energy is gone. His eyes blink at Elias sleepily; a few even close, and Elias strokes the thin black eyelids with one finger, his head nestled in Jon’s shoulder.

It won’t last long, he knows—it never does. The Archive will chew up those memories and stories and their husks will float inside him until fear destroys them, too. Then he will be back to working, building his tower higher and higher and higher, toward the center of the pupil of the Eye. Then Elias will make the long descent through the rooms and corridors, past Martin in his wall, back down the more ordered stairwells of his tower to the place where he exists, in whatever way he exists. Back to watching while the world feeds the Archive more and more material for his work.

For now he relishes the quiet under the Eye’s burning stare. Jon nudges against him, almost affectionately, wearily. He must be so tired from all his building.

Elias wonders what will happen when the tower reaches the Eye, when it threatens to pierce the pupil that watches them. What might be beyond it. If Jon will keep building forever, and if Elias will keep mounting the stairs to to give him rest when he requires it.

_Don’t worry about that now,_ whisper the walls. There is no reason not to heed them. He presses a kiss to the eyes on Jon’s forehead, to the place where his antennae sprout from his skull, and nestles close.

Overhead, the Eye blinks—just once.

**Author's Note:**

> carrie requested an expansion on the concept of jon as moth and elias as parasitoid wasp -- thank you for supporting the BLM movement!


End file.
